1. Technical Field
The present principles relate generally to usability assessment and, in particular, to linking graphical user interface testing tools and human perfoimance modeling to enable usability assessment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Regression testing of usability has remained largely untreated in the software engineering (SE) literature. However, regression testing of usability is an important consideration in software development, because as systems grow in functionality, they often also grow in complexity, which can hurt end-user efficiency and discoverability (i.e., the ability for a new user to discover how to accomplish a task through exploring the interface). Usability testing is traditionally empirical, bringing end-users in to a testing facility, asking them to perform tasks on the system (or prototype), and measuring such things as the time taken to perform the task, the percentage of end-users who can complete the task in a fixed amount of time, and the number and type of errors made by the end-users. However, both collecting and analyzing the human data is time consuming and expensive.